GILLES DE CORBEIL (
LatinLatin : Egidius de Corbolio or Egidius
Corboliensis; also Aegidius) was a French royal physician, teacher,
and poet. He was born in approximately 1140 and died in the first
quarter of the 13th century. He is the author of four medical poems
and a scathing anti-clerical satire , all in
LatinLatin dactylic hexameters
.

He returned to
ParisParis between ca. 1180 and 1194, becoming a canon and
the court physician to
Philip II of FrancePhilip II of France . He proudly presented
himself as a pioneer of academic medicine in France, upholding the
prestige of the Salernitan medicine over rivals such as the
MontpellierMontpellier school and the "empiric"
Rigord . The epilogue to De
urinis is a particularly bitter denunciation of Montpellier, its vain
contentiousness and obliviousness to true science (
LatinLatin :
Monspessulanicus error), and even its people; one Medieval commentator
explains this in terms of an unhappy visit to the city by Gilles.

POEMS FOR STUDENTS: DE URINIS AND DE PULSIBUS

His brief poems De urinis (352 verses on uroscopy ) and De pulsibus
(380 verses on Galenic pulsology ), based on treatises by Theophilus
Protospatharius by way of the
Articella , were intended as mnemonic
aids for his students to memorize, reflecting his preoccupation with
pedagogy. They became didactic classics and were widely studied,
copied, and commented upon.

DE SIGNIS ET SYMPTOMATIBUS EGRITUDINUM

This poem of 2,358 verses, not printed until 1907, deals with the
signs and symptoms of humoral excess and diseases (organized from head
to foot), proceeding to "sections on gynecological disorders and on
whole-body diseases such as arthritis , leprosy , and fevers ."

IERAPIGRA AD PURGANDOS PRELATOS

His Laxative for Purging
Prelates (
LatinLatin : Ierapigra ad purgandos
prelatos; a
SalernoSalerno glossary explains yerapigra literally as "sacred
and bitter medicine," sacrum amarum, from Greek ἱερός, often
used for a special pharmacological recipe, and πικρός ), a
satire in nine books and 5,929 verses, was discovered in 1837 among
manuscripts deriving from the library of
Pierre PithouPierre Pithou . It
particularly targets
Guala Bicchieri but takes aim more generally at
the abuses prevalent among ecclesiastical officials. In a prologue,
the poet invokes, not a
MuseMuse , but a pope (apparently Innocent III ),
from whom he hopes to receive the antidote that can cure the morally
sick prelates .